I think I have an idea that will work for you. Why not use an Excel macro to do this for you. You’ve already done the hard work of figuring out all of the permutations.

Here’s my idea.

Write each paragraph of your article in Cell.
Place a “label” cell above each paragraph with the “id” of the paragraph.

Write a simple macro that spits out your mashed up article into it’s own worksheet.

I’m pretty sure I could write this macro in about 2 hours. If you’re intersted, email me: steve@umgsp.com, or skype me Id: stevewar1, and I’d be happy to work with you on this one..

-Steve

@Craig, well yes, my thoughts exactly. I don’t really like my own method much because large chunks (each paragraph) are still duplicated somewhere. Ideally, at this point I would use some additional tool to do some re-writing for me. This is something I aim to experiment with.

Great post – I like your “outside the box” thinking with regards to creating different variations of the same article. I guess the question that still remains for me is how different does the article content need to be in order to be deemed unique by Google? At what point, will Google still be able to determine the overlap in content between these articles. It is kind of the age old question of “What is Plagiarism”? You mix around the words, but are you still plagiarizing the work?

Anyways, I would be interested to get yours and others feedback and thoughts.

Craig

One of the things I like about you is that you share.
Experimentation is the most important thing you can do.
Sharing your “lab notes” has a great benefit: others feel compelled to share with you!

So here is a tip, submit your article to a translation service. Go from English to Greek and back to English. The resulting article will undoubtedly be different!

Although this idea is sort of tongue-in-cheek, perhaps it may inspire further research in your mashup endeavor.

Cheers,

Mitch

For example, through some elementary detective work, I discovered a 30DCer with the same niche & keyword phrase as mine, and was able to link his real name to his niche through one of his content articles (which was a good article).

In later research on my niche, I found the mega-load of articles on my niche and lo&behold, it was the same guy!

I began reading the articles and was quickly irritated as they were all mashups with different headlines.

I quickly realized that while his original article (or six) may have been good, it was a waste of my time to sort through his articles filtering the repeat stuff from the new stuff. Sadly, his site will get a lot of links because there are links TO each mashup article…but in the end, he is not contributing valuable content to the searches in my (our) niche.

I am not ready to give up on the niche because of his “bum” techniques as I know I can provide much more value to my readers…

So in summary, submitting to multiple DIFFERENT directories makes complete sense as you have noted. Good luck!

For anyone else who needs to contact me, there is a contact tab at the top of the blog. Link below:

http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/contact/

That’s generally quicker as it comes straight into my email but I have to manually login to my blog to check my comments.

Ethically speaking, I don’t have a problem with submitting my own work to multiple directories. I’m trying to spread my work as far and wide as possible to give it the best possible chance of being seen, and of course, picking up backlinks in the process.

I see this as being the same (ethically) as socially bookmarking a page on multiple bookmarking sites, or posting the same news story to multiple story submission sites. Not everybody reads Digg, not everybody uses delicious, not everybody searches EZineArticles so I want to hit as many services as possible. From that standpoint, I don’t see a problem with multiple submissions.

It’s not like spamming one article directory with a dozen copies of the same re-written article which I would consider to be spam.

From the point of a person searching for information, there are two primary ways in which they would find these articles – a Google search, and directly from the article directory. I suspect that most people who use article directories have their favourite and are not likely to look for articles on many directories. And as for Google rankings, from what I have heard, only an article on EZineArticles is likely to get anywhere near the first page of Google results.

Taking a vertical slice, looking at all the submissions I made to any single directory, every article would be on a different subject. The duplication is only apparent when you take a horizontal slice that looks at all the directories.

So I don’t think that a real person looking for information relating to the keyword is likely to find more than one copy of the article. Each one is written to provide good value as is the content on the site I am linking to.

The difference between that and the blog posts is that I choose to subscribe to all those blogs because they each provide something unique that I want to read. My theory is based around my assumption that most people do not regularly peruse many article directories at once. If I am wrong there, then they will see some duplication.

You can take each sentence and manually rewrite it say 4 times.

The spinner will then make new articles by using one of the four versions of each sentence and put them together.

Instead of sentences you can also only use larger blocks of words.

It’s a 200 dollar investment, but it is a very great and helpfull tool.

@Josh, Yes I agree and I do want to create articles that are genuinely useful. With my mashup method they still are, I haven’t checked out the spinner software yet butI would of course proof read and edit anything it generated.

Thanks for the distinction, I thought they were just the same thing. I guess this is Article Marketing then, but I did my logo so I’ll have to stick with it :-)

I would imagine unless these articles are still interesting and well-written, they won’t do you alot of good in the long run.

This brings up another point. “Bum Marketing” is a technique that has been around for years, but Travis Sago coined it as such. Many people call “article marketing” ” bum marketing” but they are not two in the same.

Bum marketing is a technique used to make affiliate sales through article marketing, press releases etc. while “article marketing” is strictly marketing with articles.

Great post and if the finished product is well-written, informational articles then you’ve come up with a great tool!

I’ll stay tuned.

@45n5, For my current niche I don’t think I’d find a database of articles for it though it’s something I could look into for other niches. However, I do have some programming ideas related for this – stay tuned for tonight’s post :p

trying to do article marketing is saturated beyond belief, there are a million and one posts like this where somebody thinks they’ve found the edge to win at article marketing, i’ve been there too, however programmers are much rarer.

plus, trying to get traffic via google is much easier done wholesale instead of article by article.

what I’m getting at is you might want to look into purchasing databases of data or hitting the product api’s and mashing up that stuff.

A hit with article marketing simply add a few dozen articles tot he search engines. A hit with a large dataset ads tens of thousands of pages to the search engines.

I’ve tried both and had much more financial success with mashing up api’s and databases.

Of course everybody’s path is different. Just a thought ;-)

If you put statcounter on your site, you can use the “Came From” facility to get a reasonable idea of the referring links.

This might help.

Something like JetSpinner can easily make hundreds of unique articles for the same amount of effort that you’re putting in now.

All the articles may not be perfect.. but they should all be human readable. Save the good ones for the top directories!

There are a lot of choices out there, just google for “article spinner”

By mashing them up in a way that doesn’t pull too many sections from each one there is duplication but only a small amount – just a couple of paragraphs. Hopefully that’s not enough to endure a slap from the mighty Google.

Lastly, there are tools to re-write the article for you. Sean has kindly directed me to one of them that he uses and I’m going to try that out and report on my findings.

For example if I wrote an essay for an English exam and then someone else took my essay and just resubmitted it as their work switching some paragraphs and swapping words – I’m sure it still would have been flagged as a suspicious piece of work.

How can you make sure that your articles don’t end up being the same as each other without actually having something new and unique in each one?

@45n5, lol you’re not wrong there but I’m working on some stuff to make that easier, stay tuned :p

@Steven, Yeah so will I! The tricky thing is, I don’t know how to track the results…

And I’ll be interested to find out how well your “paragraph rotator” technique works.

Good luck!